This week, the Infusion Access Foundation will bring our community’s voices directly to Capitol Hill for Hill Day 2026.
Hill Day is one of the most meaningful parts of our advocacy work because it brings together the people most impacted by health care access barriers — patients, caregivers, and advocates — and gives them the opportunity to speak directly with lawmakers and congressional staff. For many of our advocates, this is the next step in a journey that began long before they arrive in Washington, D.C.
They have navigated delayed diagnoses, insurance denials, step therapy requirements, prior authorization delays, unaffordable out-of-pocket costs, and other barriers that too often stand between patients and the treatments their providers prescribe. At Hill Day, those experiences become more than personal stories. They become a call to action.
This year, we are especially excited to be joined by members of our 2026 Infusion Access Champions Cohort, including Stasha, Jawan, Sheldon, Sarah, Nya, Julie, D’andre, and Betty. These Champions represent different diagnoses, different states, and different lived experiences — but they share a common goal: protecting access to provider-administered therapies and making sure policymakers understand what is at stake when patients face unnecessary barriers to care.
Why Hill Day Matters
For patients who rely on infusions and injections, access is not abstract. It determines whether someone can go to work, attend school, care for their family, manage pain, avoid disease progression, or simply participate in daily life.
Too often, decisions about patient care are shaped by insurance policies rather than conversations between patients and their providers. A treatment may be prescribed, but that does not always mean it will be covered quickly, affordably, at the site of care that works best for the patient, or at all.
That is why Hill Day matters.
When patients sit across from lawmakers and staff, they put real faces to the policies being debated in Washington. They explain what it feels like to be told to fail a medication before accessing the one their doctor prescribed. They describe the frustration of waiting for prior authorization approvals while symptoms worsen. They share the financial strain of copay accumulator and maximizer programs. They talk about how pharmacy benefit manager practices can limit choice, increase costs, and disrupt care.
Most importantly, they remind policymakers that behind every policy discussion is a person trying to get the care they need.
What We’re Talking About on Capitol Hill
During Hill Day, the Infusion Access Foundation will focus on several federal policy priorities that would help reduce barriers to care and protect patients who rely on provider-administered treatments.
The Safe Step Act
Step therapy requires patients to try and “fail” an insurer-preferred treatment before the plan will cover the medication originally prescribed by their provider. For patients with complex chronic illnesses, this can delay effective care, worsen symptoms, and force patients to spend weeks or months on treatments that may not be right for them.
The Safe Step Act would create commonsense exceptions to step therapy protocols in employer-sponsored health plans. These exceptions would help ensure patients are not forced through unnecessary delays when a required treatment has already failed, is expected to be ineffective, could cause harm, or when a patient is already stable on their current medication.
Patients should not have to get sicker before they can get better.
Patients Before Monopolies Act
Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, play a major role in determining which medications are covered, what patients pay, and where patients can receive care. In recent years, the PBM industry has become increasingly vertically integrated, with large corporations owning PBMs, insurers, and pharmacies under the same corporate structure.
This consolidation can create incentives that prioritize affiliated businesses over patient choice and independent providers. For patients, that can mean higher costs, fewer options, and more barriers to accessing the care their provider recommends.
The Patients Before Monopolies Act would address harmful vertical integration by limiting the ability of companies that own PBMs or health insurers to also own pharmacies. This reform is about putting patients before profits and protecting access to care in a system where too many decisions are already made far away from clinical settings.
The HELP Copays Act
Many patients rely on copay assistance to afford specialty medications. But copay accumulator and maximizer programs can prevent that assistance from counting toward a patient’s deductible or out-of-pocket maximum.
That means patients may use available assistance and still face large, unexpected costs later in the year. For people who depend on expensive specialty medications, those costs can force impossible choices: delay treatment, skip doses, take on debt, or go without the care they need.
The HELP Copays Act would help ensure that copay assistance counts toward a patient’s cost-sharing obligations. All copays should count, and patients should not be penalized for using support that helps them access prescribed care.
The Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act
Prior authorization is intended to determine whether a medication or service will be covered before care is delivered. But too often, it becomes a delay tactic that keeps patients waiting for treatment their providers have already determined is medically necessary.
The Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act would modernize and streamline prior authorization in Medicare Advantage plans by requiring electronic prior authorization processes and increasing transparency around how prior authorization is used.
For patients, timely access matters. Delays can mean worsening symptoms, disease progression, avoidable complications, and unnecessary stress for patients and providers alike.
Patient Stories Are the Heart of Advocacy
Policy can feel complicated. Patient stories make it clear.
When our Champions share their experiences, they help lawmakers understand how access barriers show up in real life. They show what happens when someone waits years for answers, fights repeated denials, struggles to afford medication, or has to push through a system that was not designed around the patient experience.
Our Champions are not expected to be policy experts. They are experts in their own experiences. And those experiences are powerful.
Hill Day is about creating space for those stories to be heard — and making sure they help shape the policies that affect patients across the country.
You Can Take Action, Too
Even if you will not be with us in Washington, D.C., you can still help amplify our message before Hill Day.
Ahead of our meetings on Capitol Hill, we encourage you to send a letter to your lawmakers urging them to support patient-centered reforms that improve access to provider-administered therapies.
Take action here:
- Safe Step Act
- Patients Before Monopolies Act
- HELP Copays Act
- Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act
You can also follow along on social media as our Champions and team bring patient voices to Capitol Hill. We will be sharing updates, photos, and moments from the day as advocates meet with lawmakers and staff to fight for better access to care.
Follow the Infusion Access Foundation on social media and help us amplify the message: patients deserve timely, affordable access to the treatments their providers prescribe.
Hill Day is more than a trip to Washington, D.C. It is a reminder that when patients share their stories, they can move policy forward.